Cuba to reopen to tourism in November with more flights and no quarantine

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cuba announced on Tuesday the measures for the total reopening to tourism in November, such as eliminating mandatory quarantine and a drastic increase of international air connections, after Covid-19 reduced to a minimum the arrival of visitors in the last year and a half.

The Ministry said that, as of that date, Cuba will relax its stringent hygiene-health protocols on all arrivals and focus instead on symptomatic patients, monitoring temperatures, and on random testing. 

Speaking on the television program Mesa Redonda, the Minister of Tourism, Juan Carlos García, said that the decision had been collegiate and based on several factors. These included, he said, the government’s decision to vaccinate the entire population, recent acceleration in national vaccination rates to between 150,000 to 200,000 doses daily, and the high percentages of the population of those vaccinated in Cuba’s principal source markets, Canada, France, the UK, Germany, and Spain. 

This, García said, would enable Cuba to restart the country’s tourism economy, providing benefits to many sectors of the Cuban economy, but would, as opening proceeded, require constant “analysis, seriousness, and responsibility”. 

Speaking about the sector’s economic importance to the Cuban economy, the Minister noted the strategic and dynamic role it played. Observing that more than 75% of the purchases tourism now makes are from national industries, he said that reopening will require “industries prepare for November, not just conclude contracts”. Stressing this meant them not substituting alternative products, he said that supplies to the tourism sector must be produced with quality. 

Source: https://bit.ly/3lWvDfd